Vocal Blog

Singing Louder

Posted by Kris on Nov 3rd, 2009 | 2 comments home title

Have you ever heard a loud singer and thought, “Wow, I wish I could sing that way if I wanted to”? Not that our main goal should be to sing as loudly as possible, but could you put out more volume if you wanted to? I believe good singers have a wide range of dynamics at their disposal so let’s look at some ways to give us a little more “umph” when needed:

1. Open your mouth. :-) This should be obvious, yet many vocalists need to practice opening their mouth more when they sing. Without a larger mouth shape, the sound can become quite muffled and even the ends of words become lost. Think about hearing a country singer – now I like country music occasionally so don’t hit me – this style can be mimicked by creating a small mouth size and not opening your lips much at all. Not all country singers use this technique; this is just a quick way of imitating a style. Some of us have smaller mouth sizes and need to concentrate on this even more.

2. Check that you are using low breathing techniques (check the Basic Breathing post for one idea). The best support for your sound comes from proper breathing – the lower you can breathe and effectively use your air the better! Hint – your shoulders should not move up when you inhale. If you are hearing a “gasp” for air sound (or any noisy breathing) then this too is a sign of something off in your breathing technique. Learn to support your tone and use your air efficiently so as to not run out half way through a phrase. Breathing is about 70% of singing, in my opinion, so this is a topic I’ll blog about more in the future.

3. Placement of tone – this is huge and can take some singers a long while to figure out how to use this tool. Really good technique is when a singer can focus their tone in the “mask of the face” keeping open vowel sounds. This is like shooting an arrow somewhere kind of ahead of you OR shooting the arrow directly toward a bull’s-eye. The mask of your face is generally the middle front of your cheek bones, about one finger’s width on either side of your nose. Try placing your fingers on your face as described above and concentrate on making every vowel sound focus there. Focusing tone uses all the reverberation in a person’s face and throat and aims it effectively. What used to be an “ee” vowel that was slightly airy and didn’t carry much energy or volume now becomes clear and can carry much farther even w/o a microphone. Think opera w/o lots of vibrato – the singers acting in operas don’t use microphones yet their voices carry extremely far. So we aren’t going for that classical style, but rather some of that most helpful technique.

One warm up to use is humming up a scale (1,2,3,4,5) and coming down the scale (5,4,3,2,1) on one vowel sound (e, a, oo, oh, ah). (This warm-up is exercise #5 on the Vocal Warm-ups CD) Concentrate on the “humm” sound which is naturally almost fully focused in the mask of the face. Try this warm-up with all the vowel sounds. By the way the Warm-ups CD is now finally downloadable! You can check this out at the Singers’ Resource Store if you are interested.

That’s a few thoughts anyway. Let me know how it goes and what technique may have helped you. :-)

2 Responses home title